E. C. STEDMAN 



Edgar Allan Poe 




I 



BOSTON 

HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY 

m^ imtx^M ^^^, €mbx\tjQt 

MDCCCLXXXI 




Copyright, iSSo, 
By EDMUND CLARENCE STEDMAN. 



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The Riverside Press, Cambridge : 
StereotjTied and Printed by H. O. Houghton & Co 



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ii 



To 
THOMAS BAILEY ALDRICH. 



EDGAR ALLAN POE. 



" Man doth not yield himself to the angels, nor unto 
death utterly, save only through the weakness of his own 
feeble will." — Joseph Glanvil. [Quoted in "Ligeia,"] 



EDGAR ALLAN POE. 



I. 

Upon the roll of American au- Distinctive 

reptitaUo7ts. 

thors a few names are written apart 
from the rest. With each of these 
is associated some accident of con- 
dition, some memory of original or 
eccentric genius, through which it 
arrests attention and claims our spe- 
cial wonder. The light of none 
among these few has been more 
fervid and recurrent than that of 
Edgar Allan Poe. But, as I in turn 
pronounce his name, and in my 
turn would estimate JLhfi.. man and 
his writings, I am at once -eonffont- 
ed by the question. Is this poet, 
as now remembered, as now por- 



The witch- 
ery of Time. 



EDGAR ALLAN FOE. 

trayed to us, the real Poe who lived 
and sang and suffered, and who died 
but little more than a quarter-cent- 
ury ago ? 

The great heart of the world throbs 
warmly over the struggles of our kind ; 
the imagination of the world dwells 
upon and enlarges the glory and the 
shame of human action in the past. 
Year after year, the heart-beats are 
more warm, the conception grows 
more distinct with light and shade. 
The person that was is made the 
framework of an image to which the 
tender, the romantic, the thoughtful, 
the simple, and the wise add each 
his own folly or wisdom, his own joy 
and sorrow and uttermost yearning. 
Thus, not only true heroes and poets, 
but many who have been conspicu- 
ous through force of circumstances, 
become idealized as time goes by. 
The critic's first labor often is the 
task of distinguishing between men 
as history and their works display 



EDGAR ALLAN FOE. \ 

them and the ideals which one and 
another have conspired to urge upon 
his acceptance. 

The difficulty is increased when, 
as in the case of Poe, a twofold ideal ^^ two/old 

' ideal. 

exists, of whose opposite sides many 
that have written upon him seem to 
observe but one. In the opinion of 
some people, even now, his life was 
not only pitiful, but odious, and his 
writings are false and insincere. 
They speak of his morbid genius, 
his unjust criticisms, his weakness 
and ingratitude, and scarcely can en- 
dure the mention of his name. Oth- 
ers recount his history as that of a 
sensitive, gifted being, most sorely 
beset and environed, who was tried 
beyond his strength and prematurely 
yielded, but still uttered not a few 
undying strains. As a new gen- 
eration has arisen, and those of his 
own who knew him are passing away, 
the latter class of his reviewers seems 
to outnumber the former. A chorus 



8 EDGAR ALLAN POE. 

of indiscriminate praise has grown 
so loud as really to be an ill omen 
for his fame ; yet, on the whole, the 
wisest modern estimate of his char- 
acter and writings has not lessened 
the interest long ago felt in them at 
home and abroad. 

It seems to me that two things at 
Postulates, least are certain. First, and although 
his life has been the subject of the 
research which is awarded only to 
strange and suggestive careers, he 
was, after all, a man of like passions 
with ourselves, — one who, if weak- 
er in his weaknesses than many, and 
stronger in his strength, may not 
have been so bad, nor yet so good, 
as one and another have painted 
him. Thousands have gone as far 
toward both extremes, and the world 
never has heard of them. Only the 
gift of genius has made the temper- 
ament of Poe a common theme. 
And thus, I also think, we are sure, 
in once more calling up his shade, 



EDGAR ALLAN FOE. 9 

that we invoke the manes of a poet. 
Of his right to this much-abused ti- 
tle there can be little dispute, nor 
of the claim that, whatever he lacked 
in compass, he was unique among Unique 
his fellows, — so different from any Poe'sgeniui, 
other writer that America has pro- 
duced as really to stand alone. He 
must have had genius to furnish 
even the basis for an ideal which 
excites this persistent interest. Yes, 
we are on firm ground with relation 
to his genuineness as a poet. But 
his narrowness of range, and the 
slender body of his poetic remains, 
of themselves should make writers 
hesitate to pronounce him our great- 
est one. His verse is as conspicu- 
ous for what it shows he could not 
do as for that which he did. He 
is another of those poets, outside 
the New England school, of whom 
each has made his mark in a sepa- 
rate way, — among them all, none 
more decisively than Poe. So far 



lO EDGAR ALLAN FOE. 

as the judgment of a few rare spirits 
in foreign lands may be counted the 
verdict of "posterity," an estimate 
of him is not to be lightly and flip- 
pantly made. Nor is it long since a 
group of his contemporaries and suc- 
cessors, m his own country, spoke of 
him as a poet whose works are a 
lasting monument, and of his "im- 
perishable " fame. 

After every allowance, it seems 
difficult for one not utterly jaded to 
read his poetry and tales without 
yielding to their original and haunt- 
ing spell. Even as we drive out of 
Personal as- mind the popular conceptions of his 
nature, and look only at the portraits 
of him in the flesh, we needs must 
pause and contemplate, thoughtfully 
and with renewed feeling, one of the 
marked ideal faces that seem — like 
those of Byron, De Musset, Heine 
— to fulfill all the traditions of gen- 
ius, of picturesqueness, of literary 
and romantic effect. 



EDGAR ALLAN FOE. II 

Halpin's engraving of Poe, in ^.f^^^'^ . 
which the draughtsman was no ser- Poe, in tJie 
vile copyist, but strove to express a merican 
the sitter at his best, makes it pos- 
sible to recall the poet delineated by 
those who knew and admired him in 
his nobler seasons. We see one they 
describe as slight but erect of figure, 
athletic and well molded, of middle 
height, but so proportioned as to 
seem every inch a man ; his head 
finely modeled, with a forehead and 
temples large and not unlike those 
of Bonaparte; his hands fair as a 
woman's, — in all, a graceful, well- 
dressed gentleman, — one, even in 
the garb of poverty, "with gentleman 
written all over him." We see the 
handsome, intellectual face, the dark 
and clustering hair, the clear and 
sad gray-violet eyes, — large, lus- 
trous, glowing with expression, — 
the mouth, whose smile at least was 
sweet and winning. We imagine the 
soft, musical voice (a delicate thing 



T2 EDGAR ALLAN FOE. 

in man or woman), the easy, quiet 
movement, the bearing that no fail- 
ure could humble. And this man 
had not only the gift of beauty, but 
the passionate love of beauty, — 
either of which may be as great a 
blessing or peril as can befall a hu- 
man being stretched upon the rack 
of this tough world. 

But look at some daguerreotype 
^rX*'^' taken shortly before his death, and 
it is like an inauspicious mirror, that 
shows all too clearly the ravage 
made by a vexed spirit within, and 
loses the qualities which only a liv- 
ing artist could feel and capture. 
Here is the dramatic, defiant bear- 
ing, but with it the bitterness of 
scorn. The disdain of an habitual 
sneer has found an abode on the 
mouth, yet scarcely can hide the 
tremor of irresolution. In Bendann's 
likeness,^ indubitably faithful, we find 

1 A photograph of this, from the daguerreotype 
taken in Richmond, is the frontispiece of the "Me- 



EDGAR ALLAN FOE. 13 

those hardened lines of the chin and 
neck that are often visible in men 
who have gambled heavily, which 
Poe did not in his mature years, or 
who have lived loosely and slept ill. 
The face tells of battling, of con- 
quering external enemies, of many 
a defeat when the man was at war 
with his meaner self. 

moVial Volume," published in Baltimore, 1877. The 
portrait in Scribner's Monthly, May, 1880 (from which 
the vignette upon the title-page is reduced), was copied 
from one of the latest daguerreotypes obtained of the 
poet. The editor was indebted to Dr. H. S. Cornwall 
of New London for the use of this picture, and for 
the facts establishing its authenticity. It was taken 
in Providence, R. I. The lines of the neck and chin 
are not so heavy as in the Bendann daguerreotype, but 
my comments on the latter otherwise apply to this 
picture. Mr. Cornwell writes of it : — 

" The aspect is one of mental misery, bordering on 
wildness, disdain of human sympathy, and scornful 
intellectual superiority. There is also in it, I think, 
dread of imminent calamity, coupled with despair and 
defiance, as of a hunted soul at bay." 

Miss Nora Perry has sent me the photograph of 
another picture taken in Providence, that was Mrs. 
Whitman's favorite likeness of her poet-lover. An 
original daguerreotype, from which the engraving 
used for the English editions of Poe's works was 
copied, is also in my possession, a gift from my friend 
and former publisher, Mr. Benjamin H. Ticknor. 



14 EDGAR ALLAN FOE. 

Among the pen-portraits of Poe, 
at his best and his worst, none seem 
more striking in their juxtaposition, 
none less affected by friendship or 

Reprinted hatred, than those left to us by C. F. 

ilrl^ ''/2" Briggs, the poet's early associate. 

ytZ'i^f" These were made but a short time 

1880. before the writer's death, — after the 

lapse of years had softened the preju- 
dices of a man prejudiced indeed, 
yet of a kindly heart, and had ren- 
dered the critical habit of the jour- 
nalist almost a rule of action. 

If these external aspects were the 
signs of character within, we can un- 
derstand why those who saw them 
should have believed of Poe — and 
in a different sense than of Haw- 
thorne — that 

" Two natures in him strove 
Like day with night, his sunshine and his gloom." 

The recorded facts of his life serve 
to enhance this feeling. My object 
here is not biography, but let us note 
the brief annals of the wayward, 



EDGAR ALLAN POE. 15 

time-tossed critic, romancer, poet. 
Their purport and outline, seen 
through a cloud of obscurities, and 
the veil thrown over them by his own 
love of mystery and retreat, — made 
out from the various narratives of 
those who have contended in zeal to 
discover the minute affairs of this 
uncommon man, — the substance of 
them all, I say, may readily enough 
be told. 



1 6 EDGAR ALLAN FOE. 



11. 



The law of chance, that has so 
much to do with the composition of 
a man, that makes no two aUke, yet 
adjusts the most of us to a common 
average, brings about exceptional 
unions like the one from which the 
poet sprang. A well-born, dissolute 
Maryland boy, with a passion for the 
stage, marries an actress and adopts 
her profession, — taking up a life 
that was strolling, precarious, half- 
despised in the pioneer times. Three 
children were the fruit of this love- 
fjfplfj' match. The second, Edgar, was born 
born in Bos- in Boston, Januarv lo, 1809.^ From 

ton, Janu- ' *' J ^^ V 

ary 10, 180Q. , ,, „ ,^ ^ , 

1 Messrs. Gill and Ingrain agree upon January igtn 

as the date of the poet's birth ; but Mr. Stoddard 
thinks that Mrs. Poe played at the Boston Theatre 
on the night of the 20th, and that Edgar was born 
upon the 19th of February. 



EDGAR ALLAN FOE. 17 

his father he inherited ItaUan, French, 
and Irish blood ; the Celtic pride of 
disposition and certain weaknesses 
that were his bane. His mother, 
Elizabeth Arnold, an actress of some 
talent, was as purely English as her 
name. Two years after his birth, 
the hapless parents, wearied and des- 
titute, died at Richmond, both in the 
same week. The orphans " found 
kind friends," and were adopted — 
the oldest, William, by his grand- 
father Poe, of Baltimore ; Edgar and 
Rosalie by citizens of Richmond. 
Edgar gained a devoted protector in ^^f^^^'^ 
Mr. Allan, a person of great fortune, 
married, but without a child. The 
boy's beauty and precocity won the 
heart of this gentleman, who gave 
him his name, and lavished upon 
him, in true Southern style, all that 
perilous endearment which befits the 
son and heir of a generous house. 
Servants, horses, dogs, the finest 
clothes, a purse well filled, all these 



1 8 EDGAR ALLAN FOE. 

were at his disposal from the outset. 
Great pains were taken with his edu- 
cation, the one element of moral dis- 
cipline seemingly excepted. When 
eight years old he went with Mr. 
Allan to England, and was at the 
school in Stoke-Newington, to which 
it is thought his memory went back 
in after years, when he wrote the 
Trahiing tale of " William Wilson." At ten 
we find him at school in Richmond, 
proficient in classical studies but 
shirking his mathematics, already 
writing verse, — instinctively 

" Seeking with hand and heart 
The teacher whom he learned to love 
Before he knew 'twas Art." 

His grace and strength, his free, ro- 
mantic, and ardent bearing, made 
him friends among old and young, 
and at this time he certainly was 
capable of the most passionate loy- 
alty to those he loved. Traditions 
of all this — of his dreamy, fitful 
temperament, of his early sorrows 



EDGAR ALLAN FOE. 19 

and his midnight mournings over the 
grave of a lovely woman who had 
been his paragon — are carefully pre- 
served. He was a school-boy, here 
and there, until 1826, when he passed 
a winter at the University of Vir- College u/e. 
ginia. He ended his brief course in 
the school of ancient and modern 
languages with a successful examina- 
tion, but after much dissipation and 
gambling which deeply involved him 
in debt. His thoughtlessness and 
practical ingratitude justly incensed 
an unwise, affectionate guardian. A 
rupture followed between the two, 
Mr. Allan finally refusing to counte- 
nance Edgar's extravagances ; and 
the young man betook himself to his 
aunt, Mrs. Maria Clemm of Balti- 
more, in whose house he found a 
home for about two years. -"^ Her 

1 The unauthentic story of Poe's expedition to Eu- 
rope, that he might join the Gi'eeks in their struggle 
for independence, warrants a reference to his elder 
brother, the real hero of this adventure. William H. 
L. Poe was as handsome and as dissipated as Edgar; 
he also wrote verses, but died in early manhood 



20 EDGAR ALLAN FOE. 

daughter Virginia was then six years 
old, and Poe interested himself in 
the training of the sweet and gentle 
child, who loved him from the first, 
and made his will her law through 
girlhood and their subsequent wed- 
''Tameriane ded life. At this period he brouMit 

and Other ■, • r ^ • i • 

Poems: "' out liis first DooK, a reviscd collection 

Boston, 1827. r 1 • • -1 T o 1 • 

Reprinted, 01 his juvcnile pocms. In 1829 his 
Ztdlmh-^^ heart was touched by news of the 
tore, f&t" death of Mrs. Allan, who had always 
given him a sympathetic mother's 
love, and he easily effected a recon- 
ciliation with the widower in his hour 
of loneliness and sorrow. 

Poe now was asked to choose a 
profession ; he selected that of arms, 
and his benefactor secured his ad- 
West Point, mission to West Point. Here we 
find him in 1830, and find little good 
of him. Though now a man grown, 
he was unable to endure discipline. 
After a first success, he tired of the 
place and brought about his own ex- 
pulsion and disgrace, to his patron's 



EDGAR ALLAN FOE. 21 

deep, and this time lasting, resent- 
ment. But here he also arranged for 
the issue, by subscription, of another fj^^fJ^J^^y"" 
edition of his poems, which was de- '^f^^^f-f^ 

, . N^ew York, 

livered to his classmates after his JtSji. 
departure from the academy. 

A new personage now comes upon 
the scene. Mr. Allan, naturally de- 
siring affection from some quarter, 
married again, and after a time heirs 
were born to the estate which Poe, 
had he been less reckless, would 
have inherited. The poet, returning 
in disgrace to Richmond, found no 
intercessor in the home of his youth. 
This change, and his manner of life 
thus far, render it needless to look 
for other causes of the final rupture 
between himself and his guardian. 
It was the just avenge of fate for 
his persistent folly, and a defeat was 
inevitable in his contest with a lady 
who, by every law of right, was 
stronger than he. Poe went out Adrift. 
into the world with full permission 



22 EDGAR ALLAN FOE. 

to have the one treasure he had 
seemed to vakie — his own way. 
Like a multitude of American 
youths, often the sons or grandsons 
of successful men, he found himself 
of age, without the means propor- 
tionate to the education, habits, and 
needs of a gentleman, and literally, 
in the place of ah unfailing income, 
without a cent. Better off than 
many who have erred less, he had 
His one ally, q^q stroug ally — his pen. With 
this he was henceforth to earn his 
own bed and board, and lead the ar- 
duous life of a working man of let- 
ters. 

For the struggle no'w begun his 
resources of tact, good sense, self- 
poise, were as deficient as his Intel 
lectual equipment was great. It 
would not be strange if the disputed 
legend of his enlistment as a private 
soldier, under his first sense of help- 
lessness, should prove, in spite of its 
coincidence with an episode in Cole- 



EDGAR ALLAN FOE. 23 

ridge's life, to be founded on fact. 
Soon after the loss of a homeright, 
which he forfeited more recklessly 
than Esau, his professional career 
may be said to have begun. It ex- 
tended, with brief but frequent inter- 
missions, from 1832 to 1849, the year 
of his untimely death. Its first note- 
worthy event was the celebrated in- start 
troduction to Kennedy, Latrobe, and 
Miller, through his success in win- 
ning a literary prize with the " MS. 
found in a Bottle." This brought 
him friends, work, and local reputa- 
tion, — in all, a fair and well-earned 
start. 

Seventeen years, thenceforward, Summary 

... of his ca- 

of working life, in .which no other reer. 
American writer was more active and 
prominent. I have considered else- 
where the influence of journalism 
upon authorship. It enabled Poe to 
live. On the other hand, while he 
rarely made his lighter work com- 
monplace, it limited the importance 



24 EDGAR ALLAN FOE. 

of his highest efforts, gave a para- 
graphic air to his criticisms, and left 
some of his most suggestive writings 
mere fragments of what they should 
be. He discovered the pretentious 
mediocrity of a host of scribblers, 
and when unbiased by personal feel- 
ing, and especially when doing im- 
aginative work, was one of the few 
clear-headed writers of his day. He 
knew what he desired to produce, 
and how to produce it. We say of 
Head and ^ man that his head may be wrong, 
but his heart is all right. There 
were times enough when the reverse 
of this was true of Poe. I do not 
say there were not other times when 
his heart was as sound as his percep- 
tions. What, after all, is the record 
of his years of work, and what is the 
significance of that record ? We 
must consider the man in his envi- 
ronment, and the transient, uncertain 
character of the markets to which he 
brought his wares. His labors, then, 



EDGAR ALLAN FOE. 25 

constantly were impeded, broken, 
changed ; first, by the most trying 
and uncontrollable nature that ever 
poet possessed, that ever possessed 
a poet ; by an unquiet, capricious 
temper, a childish enslavement to 
his own "Imp of the Perverse,'' 2,'' The imp 
scornful pettiness that made hnn verse.'^-' 
" hard to help," that drove him to * 

quarrel with his patient, generous 
friends, and to wage ignoble conflict 
with enemies of his own making ; by 
physical and moral lapses, partly the 
result of inherited taint, in which he 
resorted, more or less frequently, 
and usually at critical moments, — 
seasons when he needed all his re- 
sources, all his courage and man- 
hood, — to stimulants which he knew 
would madden and besot him more 
than other men. None the less his 
genius was apparent, his power felt, 
his labor in demand wherever the 
means existed to pay for it. But „ 

^ •' Precarious 

here, agam, his life was made preca- ufeo/Amer 



26 



EDGAR ALLAN FOE. 



ican authors rious and shifting by the speculative, 
'"^' ill-requited nature of literary enter 
prises at that time. From various 
causes, therefore, his record — no 
matter how it is attacked or defended 
— is one of irregularity, of broken 
and renewed engagements. From 
1832 to 1835 Po^ ^^^ ^^^ himself 
to support, and a careless young fel- 
low always gets on so long as he is 
young, with one success and the 
chance of a future. The next year 
his private marriage to his sweet 
cousin Virginia, still almost a child, 
was reaffirmed in public, and the 
two set up their home together. The 
time had come when Poe, with his 
sense of the fitness of things, could 
see that Bohemianism, the charm of 
youth, is a frame that poorly suits 
the portrait of a mature and able- 
handed man. So we are not sur- 
prised to find him engaged, for 

Journalism, houcst wagcs, upou " Thc South- 
ern Literary Messenger." That his 



Marriage 
with Vir- 
gi?iia 
Clemen, 
1835- 



EDGAR ALLAN FOE. 27 

skillful touch and fantastic genius, 
whether devoted to realistic or psy- 
chological invention, were now at 
full command, is shown by his " Hans 
Pfaall," and by his first striking con- 
tribution to the "Messenger," the 
spectral and characteristic tale of 
" Berenice." In short, he did un- 
common work, for that time, upon 
the famous Southern, magazine, both 
as tale-writer and as critic, and in- 
creased its reputation and income. 
Yet he felt, with all the morbid sen- Mental suf. 
sitiveness of one spoilt by luxury 
and arrogance in youth, the differ- 
ence between his present work-a-day 
life and the independence, the so- 
cial standing, which if again at his 
command would enable him to in- 
dulge his finer tastes and finish at 
ease the work best suited to his pow- 
ers. From this time he was subject 
to moods of brooding and despair, 
of crying out upon fate, that were 
his pest and his ultimate destruction. 



28 



EDGAR ALLAN FOE. 



Wander- 
ings. 



Work 



And so we again are not surprised 
to find this good beginning no true 
omen of the fifteen years to come ; 
and that these years are counted 
by flittings here and there between 
points that offered employment ; by 
new engagements taken up before 
he was off with the old ; by legends 
of his bearing and entanglements 
in the social world he entered; by 
alternate successes and disgraces, 
in Richmond, Philadelphia, Boston, 
New York j by friendships and fall- 
ings out with many of the editors 
who employed him, — the product, 
after all, with which we are chiefly 
concerned being his always distinc- 
tive writings for the " Quarterly," 
"The Gentleman's Magazine," " Gra- 
ham's," "Godey's," "The Mirror," 
" The American Review," and vari- 
ous other fosterers and distributors 
of such literature as the current taste 
might demand. We begin to under- 
stand his spasmodic, versatile indus- 



EDGAR ALLAN FOE. 29 

try, his balks and breaks, his fre- 
quent poverty, despondency, self- 
abandonment, and almost to wonder 
that the sensitive feminine spirit — 
worshiping beauty and abhorrent of Misfortunes. 
ugliness and pain, combating with 
pride, with inherited disease of appe- 
tite — did not sooner yield, was not 
utterly overcome almost at the out- 
set of these experiences. So have I 
wondered at seeing a delicate forest- 
bird, leagues from the shore, keep 
itself on the wing above relentless 
waters into which it was sure to fall 
at last. Poe had his good genius 
and his bad. Near the close of the 
struggle he made a brave effort, and 
never was so earnest and resolved, 
so much his own master, as just 
before the end. But a man is no ^^f/^' "'■ 

halninore. 

Stronger than his weakest part, and October 7, 
with the snapping of that his chance 
is over. At the moment when the 
poet, rallying from the desolation 
caused by the loss of his wife, found 



30 EDGAR ALLAN FOE. 

new hope and purpose, and was on 
his way to marry a woman who might 
have saved him, the tragedy of his 
life began again. Its final scene 
was as swift, irreparable, black with 
terror, as that of any drama ever 
written. His death was gloom. Men 
saw him no more ; but the shadow 
Mrs. Maria of a veilcd old womau, mourning for 
him, hovered here and there. After 
many years a laureled tomb was 
placed above his ashes, and there 
remain to American literature the 
relics, so unequal in value, of the 
most isolated and exceptional of all 
its poets and pioneers. 

Poe's misfortunes were less than 
those of some who have conquered 
misfortune. Others have been cast- 
aw^ays in infancy and friendless in 
manhood, and have found no pro- 
tectors such as came at his need. 
Others have struggled and suffered, 
and have declined to wear their 
hearts upon their sleeves. They 



EDGAR ALLAN FOE. 31 

have sought consolation in their 
work, and from their cruelest expe- 
riences have wrung its strength and 
glory. The essential part of an art- 
ist's life is that of his inspired mo- 
ments. There were occasions when 
Poe was the master, when his criti- 
cism was true, when he composed 
such tales as " Ligeia," "The Fall 
of the House of Usher," poems like 
"The Raven," "The Bells," "The 
City in the Sea." It must be ac- 
knowledged, moreover — and profes- 
sional writers know what this implies 
— that Poe, in his wanderings, after 
all, followed his market. It grad- I^^JHY'"''^ 
ually drifted to the North, until New 
York afforded the surest recompense 
to authors not snugly housed in the 
leafy coverts of New England. Nor 
did he ever resort to any mercantile 
employment for a livelihood. As we 
look around and see how authors 
accept this or that method of sup- 
port, there seems to be something 



32 EDGAR ALLAN FOE 

chivalrous in the attitude of one 

who never earned a dollar except 

by his pen. From first to last he 

A genuine -vvas simplv a poct and man of let- 

■nian of let- . 

ers. ters, who rightly might claim to be 

judged by the literary product of his 
life. The life itself differed from 
that of any modern poet of equal 
genius, and partly because none 
other has found himself, in a new 
country, among such elements. Too 
much has been written about the 
man, too little of his times ; and the 
memoir containing a judicial esti- 
mate of his writings has not yet ap- 
peared.^ 

His story has had a fascination for 

* I have a collection of essays and articles upon the 
life and writings of Poe and references to his works, 
some anonymous, otliers by Higginson, Lathrop, In- 
gram, Stoddard, Fairfield, Conway, Gosse, Swin- 
burne, etc. The following are my principal sources of 
information : — 

I. Poe 's Works. Memoir by Grlswold. Notices 
by Willis and Lowell. 4 v. [First collective edition.] 
N. Y.: 1850. II. Edgar Poe and his Critics. By 
Mrs. Whitman. N. Y. : 1S60. III. Poetical 
Works. Notice by James Hannay London: 1856 



EDGAR ALLAN FOE. 33 

those who consider the infirmity of fg^J"^^^ ^^' 
Srenius its natural outward ^\T(\. Poe'sU/e 

^ , . - . . . and works. 

The pecuharity of his actions was 
their leaning toward what is called 
the melodramatic ; of his work, that 



IV. Works. With a Study, etc., from the French 
of C. Baudelaire. London: 1872. V. Poems. 
Memoir by R. H. Stoddard. N. Y. : Widdleton. 
J875. VI. Works. 4 V. Complete revised edition. 
Memoir by John H. Ingram, etc., etc. N. Y. : 
Widdleton. 1876. VII. Memorial Volume. By 
Sara Sigourney Rice. Baltimore : 1877. VIII. 
Life. By William F. Gill. 4th edition revised. 
New York and London : 1878. IX. Life and 
Poems. Memoir by Eugene L. Didier. N. Y. : 
Widdleton. 1876. 4th edition, 1879. 

Some of the ablest estimates of Poe are to be found 
in newspaper editorials — for example, those which 
appeared in the New York Tribune and Post, Novem- 
ber, 1875, the time when a monument was placed 
above his grave. I shall refer hereafter to Griswold's 
memoir and criticisms. Of the successive memoirs 
issued within the last five years, Mr. Stoddard's bio- 
graphical sketch is that of a poet and literary expert. 
We are indebted to Mr. Gill and to Mr. Ingram for ex- 
plorations of Poe's early life, in which they have vied 
in correcting numerous errors of Griswold and other 
writers, and have brought to light facts of interest. 
Mr. Didier's estimate is a eulogy, adding little of 
worth to the information collected by Ingram and 
Gill. Since the preparation of this essay, a second 
and more extended memoir by Ingram has been issued 
in London. 

3 



34 EDGAR ALLAN FOE. 

it aimed above the level of its time. 
What has been written of the former 
— of little value as compared with 
the analysis derivable from his lit- 
erary remains — is largely the out- 
put of those who, if unable to pro- 
duce a stanza which he would have 
acknowledged, at least feel within 
themselves the possibilities of his 
errant career. Yet, as I observe the 
marvels of his handicraft, I seem 
unjust to these enthusiasts. It was 
the kind which most impresses the 
imagination of youth, and youth is a 
period at which the critical develop- 
ment of many biographers seems to 
be arrested. And who would not 
recall the zest with which he read, 
in school-boy days, and by the stolen 
candle, a legend so fearful in its 
beauty and so beautiful in its fear as 
" The Masque of the Red Death," 
for example, found in some stray 
number of a magazine, and making 
the printed trash that convoyed it 



EDGAR ALLAN POE. 35 

seem so vapid and drear ? Not long 
after, we had the collected series, 
"Tales of the Grotesque and Ara- "^f^J^^f 
besque." With what eagerness we ^^^^^J^^«^ „ 
caught them from hand to hand un- 
til many of us knew them almost 
by heart. In the East, at that time, 
Hawthorne was shyly putting out his 
" Mosses " and " Twice Told Tales," 
and it was not an unfruitful period 
that fostered, among its brood of 
chattering and aimless sentimental- 
ists, two sugh spirits at once, each 
original in his kind. To-day we 
have a more consummate, realistic 
art. But where, now, the creative 
ardor, the power to touch the stops, 
if need be, of tragedy and supersti- 
tion and remorse ! Our taste is 
more refined, our faculties are un- 
der control ; to produce the greatest 
art they must, at times, compel the 
artist. " Poetry," said Poe, " has ^^^^ry a. 

■' , passion wttk 

been with me a passion, not a pur- him. 
pose," — a remarkable sentence to 



36 EDGAR ALLAN POE. 

be found in a boyish preface, and I 
believe that he wrote the truth. But 
here, again, he displays an opposite 
faihng. If poetry had been with 
him no less a passion, and equally 
a purpose, we now should have had 
something more to represent his 
rhythmical genius than the few brief, 
occasional lyrics which are all that 
his thirty years of life as a poet — 
the life of his early choice — have 
left to us. 



EDGAR ALLAN FOE. 37 



III. 

In estimatino: him as a poet, the Lyrical 

'^ ^ \ rematns. 

dates of these lyrics are of minor 
consequence. They make but a 
thin volume, smaller than one which 
might hold the verse of Collins or 
Gray. Their range is narrower still. 
It is a curious fact that Poe struck, 
in youth, the key-notes of a few 
themes, and that some of his best 
pieces, as we now have them, are but 
variations upon their earlier treat- 
ment. 

His first collection was made in ^"-"-biooks 

of verse . 

his eidrteenth year, revised in \i\?> P^J^^^/Aje- 

y ■' ^ ^ ^ spectivaly, tn 

twentieth, and again reprinted, with 1827, i82g, 
changes and omissions, just after he 
left West Point. The form of the 
longer poems is copied from Byron and 
Moore, while the spirit of the whole 



38 EDGAR ALLAN POE. 

series vaguely reminds us of Shelley 
in his obscurer lyrical mood. Poe's 
originality can be found in them, but 
they would be valueless except for his 
after career. They have unusual sig- 
nificance as the shapeless germs of 
much that was to grow into form and 
Germs o/his bcauty. Crudc and wandering pieces, 
entitled " Fairy Land " and " Irene," 

"To ," "A Psan," etc., were 

the originals of " The Sleeper," " A 
Dream within a Dream," and " Le- 
nore ; " while '• The Doomed City " 
and " The Valley Nis " reappear as 
" The City in the Sea " and " The 
Valley of Unrest." Others were less 
thoroughly rewritten. Possibly he 
thus remodeled his juvenile verse to 
show that, however inchoate, it con- 
tained something worth a master's 
handling. Mr. Stoddard thinks, and 
not without reason, that he found 
it an easy way of making salable 
*' copy." The poet himself intimates 
that circumstances beyond his con- 



EDGAR ALLAN POE. 39 

trol restricted his lyrical product. I 
scarcely remember another instance 
where a writer has so hoarded his 
early songs, and am in doubt whether 
to commend or deprecate their repro- 
duction. It does not betoken afflu- 
ence, but it was honest in Poe that 
he would not write in cold blood for 
the mere sake of composing. This 
he undoubtedly had the skill to do, 
and would have done, if his sole ob- 
ject had been creation of the beauti- 
ful, or art' for art's sake. He used :f " «^^ ^/ 

' poesy. 

his lyrical gift mostly to express ver- 
itable feelings and moods — I might 
almost say a single feeling or mood 
— to which he could not otherwise 
give utterance, resorting to melody 
when prose was insufficient. Herein 
he was true to the cardinal, antique 
conception of poesy, and in keeping 
it distinct from his main literary- 
work he confirmed his own avowal 
that it was to him a passion, and 
neither a purpose nor a pursuit. 



40 EDGAR ALLAN FOE. 

A few poems, just as they stoodi 
in his early volumes, are admirable in 
thought or finish. One is the son- 
Precocify. net, " To Scieuce," which is striking, 
not as a sonnet, but for its premoni- 
tion of attitudes which poetry and 
science have now more clearly as- 
sumed. Another is the exquisite 
lyric, " To Helen," which every critic 
longs to cite. Its confusion of im- 
agery is wholly forgotten in the de- 
light afforded by melody, lyrical per- 
fection, sweet and classic grace. I 
do not understand why he omitted 
this charming trifle from the juvenile 
poems which he added to the collec- 
tion of 1845. Although it first ap- 
peared in his edition of 1831, he 
claimed to have written it when four- 
teen, and nothing more fresh and deli- 
cate came from his pen in maturer 
years. 

The instant success of " The Ra- 
ven" — and this was within a few 
years of his death — first made him 



EDGAR ALLAN FOE. 41 

popular as a poet, and resulted in a 

new collection of his verses. The Edition of 

184.5. 
lyrics which it contained, and a 

few written afterward, — " Ulalume," 
"The Bells," "For Annie," etc., — 
now comprise the whole of his po- 
etry as retained in the standard edi- 
tions. The most glaring faults of 
'"Al Aaraaf " and " Tamerlane " have 
been selected by eulogists for special 
praise. Turning from this practice- 
work to the poems which made his 
reputation, we come at once to the 
most widely known of all. 

Poe could not have written " The " ^'^,f ^'^- 
Raven " m youth. It exhibits a 
method so positive as almost to 
compel us to accept, against the 
denial of his associates, his own ac- 
count of its building. The maker 
does keep a firm hand on it through- 
out, and for once seems to set his 
purpose above his passion. This 
appears in the gravely quaint dic- 
tion, and in the contrast between 



42 EDGAR ALLAN FOE. 

.the reality of every-day manners and 
the profound er reality of a spiritual 
shadow upon the human heart. The 
grimness of fate is suggested by 
phrases which it requires a masterly 
hand to subdue to the meaning of 
the poem. " ' Sir,' said I, ' or mad- 
am,' " " this ungainly fowl," and the 
like, sustain the air of grotesqueness, 
and become a foil to the pathos, an 
approach to the tragical climax, of 
this unique production. Only gen- 
ius can deal so closely with the gro- 
tesque, and make it add to the solemn 
beauty of structure an effect like that 
of the gargoyles seen by moonlight 
on the fagade of Notre Dame. 

In no other lyric is Poe so self- 
UesA%7>f' possessed. No other is so deter- 
minate in its repetends and allitera- 
tions. Hence I am far from deeming 
it his most poetical poem. Its arti- 
ficial qualities are those which catch 
the fancy of the general reader ; and 
it is of all his ballads, if not the 



EDGAR ALLAN FOE. 43 

most imaginative, the most peculiar. 
His more ethereal productions seem 
to me those in which there is the 
appearance, at least, of spontaneity, 
— in which he yields to his feelings, 
while dying falls and cadences most 
musical, most melancholy, come from 
him-unawares. Literal criticisms of 
*' The Raven " are of small account. 
If the shadow of the bird could not 
fall upon the mourner, the shadows 
of its evil presence could brood upon 
his soul j the seraphim whose foot- 
falls tinkle upon the tufted floor 
may be regarded as seraphim of the 
Orient, their anklets hung with ce- 
lestial bells. At all events, Poe's 
raven is the very genius of the 
Night's Plutonian shore, different 
from other ravens, entirely his own, 
and none other can take its place. 
It is an emblem of the Irreparable, 
the guardian of pitiless memories, 
whose burden ever recalls to us the 
days that are no more. 



44 EDGAR ALLAN FOE. 

As a new creation, then, "The 

Raven " is entitled to a place in 

literature, and keeps it. But how 

much more imaginative is such a 

^\ihecny poem as "The City in the Sea"! 

in the Sea." . . , r m 

As a picture, this reminds us oi 1 ur- 
ner, and, again, of that sublime mad- 
man, John Martin. Here is a strange 
city where Death has raised a throne. 
Its 

" shrines and palaces and towers 
(Time-eaten towers that tremble not!) 
Resemble nothing that is ours. 
Around, by lifting winds forgot, 
Resignedly beneath the sky 
The melancholy waters lie." 

This mystical town is aglow with 
light, not from heaven, but from out 
the lurid sea, — light which streams 
up the turrets and pinnacles and 
domes, — 

" Up many and many a marv^elous shrine, 
Whose wreathed friezes intertwine 
The viol, the violet, and the vine. 



While, from a proud tower in the town, 
Death looks gigantically down." 

The sea about is hideously serene, 



EDGAR ALLAN FOE. 45 

but at last there is a movement ; the 
towers seem slightly to sink; the 
dull tide has a redder glow, — 

" And when, amid no earthly moans, 

Down, down that town shall settle hence, 
Hell, rising from a thousand thrones, 
Shall do it reverence." 

This poem, notwithstanding its som- 
breness and terror, depends upon 
effects which made Poe the fore- 
runner of our chief experts in form 
and sound, and both the language 
and the conception are suggestive 
in a high degree. 

" The Sleeper " is even more po- " The shep. 
etic. It distills, like drops from the 
opiate vapor of the swooning moon- 
lit night, all the melody, the fantasy, 
the exaltation, that befit the vision 
of a beautiful woman lying in her 
shroud, silent in her length of tress, 
waiting to exchange her death cham- 
ber 

" for one more holy, 
This bed, for one more melancholy." 

Poe's ideality cannot be gainsaid, 



er: 



46 EDGAR ALLAN FOE. 

but it aided him with few, very few, 
images, and those seemed to haunt 
his brain perpetually. Such an im- 
age is that of the beings who lend 
their menace to the tone of the fu- 
neral bells : — 

" And the people, — ah, the people, — 
They that dwell up in the steeple 

All alone, 
And who, tolling, tolling, tolling, 

In that muffled monotone, 
Feel a glory in so rolling 

On the human heart a stone, — 
They are neither man nor woman, 
They are neither brute nor human, 
They are Ghouls." 

''The Bells:' jn the same remarkable fantasia the 
bells themselves become human, and 
it is a master-stroke that makes us 
hear them shriek out of tune, 

" In a clamorous appealing to the mercy of the fire," 

and forces us to the very madness 
with which they are 

" Leaping higher, higher, higher, 
With a desperate desire, 
And a resolute endeavor 
Now — now to sit, or never, 
By the side of the pale-faced moon." 



EDGAR ALLAN FOE. 47 

Clearly this extravagance was sug- 
gested by the picture and the rhyme. 
But it so carries us with it that we 
think not of its meaning ; we share 
in the delirium of the bells, and noth- 
ing can be too extreme for the aban- 
don to which we yield ourselves, led 
by the faith and frenzy of the poet. 

The hinting, intermittent qualities 
of a few lyrics remind us of Shelley 
and Coleridge, with whom Poe always 
was in sympathy. The conception 
of " The Raven " was new, but in 
method it bears a likeness to " Lady ^'f'ft'^e 

J refrainana 

Geraldine's Courtship," so closely, ^^^^^^^f' 
in fact, that the rhythm of the one Brownins: 

111 r c^^d-by Poe- 

probably was suggested by that oi See " victo- 
the other. In motive they are so ^page 143. ^' 
different that neither Poe nor Mrs. 
Browning could feel aggrieved. Aft- 
er an examination of dates, and of 
other matters relating to the genesis 
of each poem, I have satisfied my- 
self, against much reasoning to the 
contrary, that Poe derived his use of 



48 EDGAR ALLAN FOE. 

the refrain and repetend, here and 
elsewhere, from the English sibyl, 
by whom they were employed to the 
verge of mannerism in her earliest 
lyrics. 

"The Conqueror Worm " expresses 

" "^^e Con. in a single moan the hopelessness of 

n^orm:' the poet s vigils among the tombs, 

where he demanded of silence and 

the night some tidings of the dead. 

All he knew was that 

" No voice from that sublimer world hath ever 
To sage or poet these responses given." 

The most he dared to ask for " The 
Sleeper " was oblivion ; that her 
sleep might be as deep as it was last- 
ing. We lay the dead " in the cold 
ground " or in the warm, flower- 
springing bosom of dear Earth, as 
best may fit the hearts of those who 
mourn them. But the tomb, the end 
of mortality, is voiceless still. If 
you would find the beginning of im- 
mortality, seek some other oracle. 
" The Conqueror Worm " is the most 



EDGAR ALLAN POE. 49 

despairing of lyrics, yet quite essen- 
tial to the mystical purpose of the 
tale "Ligeia." But to brood upon 
men as mimes, ironically cast " in 
the form of God on high," — mere 
puppets, where 

" the play is the tragedy, ' Man,' 
And its hero the Conqueror Worm," 

— that way madness lies, indeed. In 
the lyric, "For Annie," death is a 
trance ; the soul lingers, calm and 
at rest, for the fever, called living, 
is conquered. Human love remains, 
and its last kiss is still a balm. 
Something may be hereafter, — but 
what, who knows ? For repose, and 
for delicate and unstudied melody, 
it is one of Poe's truest poems, and 
his tenderest. During the brief pe- 
riod in which he survived his wife, 
he seemed to have a vision of rest 
in death, and not of horror. Two ^^9'^^^^^- 
lyrics, widely different, and one of 
them of a most singular nature, are 
thought to be requiems for his lost 
4 



5^ 



EDGAR ALLAN FOE. 



Art's strong companion. It is from no baseness, 

covtptilsion. '- .... 

but from a divine instinct, tliat genu- 
ine artists are compelled to go on 
with their work and to make their 
own misery, no less than their joy, 
promote its uses. Their most sacred 
experiences become, not of their vo- 
lition, its themes and illustrations. 
Every man as an individual is sec- 
ondary to what he is as a worker for 
the progress of his kind and the 
glory of the gift allotted to him. 

Therefore, whether Poe adored 
his wife or not, her image became 
the ideal of these poems. I shall 
add little here to all that has been 
«t/^^a;/«OT^." written of " Ulalume." It is so 
strange, so unlike anything that pre- 
ceded it, so vague and yet so full of 
meaning, that of itself it might es- 
tablish a new method. To me it 
seems an improvisation, such as a 
violinist might play upon the instru- 
ment which had become his one 
thing of worth -after th^ d-eath of a 



EDGAR ALLAN FOE. 51 

companion had left him alone with 
his own soul. Poe remodeled and 
made the most of his first broken 
draft, and had the grace not to ana- 
lyze the process. I have accepted 
his analysis of "The Raven " as 
more than half true. Poets know 
that an entire poem often is sug- 
gested by one of its lines, even by a 
refrain or a bit of rhythm. From 
this it builds itself. The last or any 
other stanza may be written first ; 
and what at first is without form is 
not void, — for ultimately it will be 
perfected into shape and meaning. 
If " Ulalume " may be termed a re- 
quiem, " Annabel Lee " is a tuneful '^f/»''"^^^ 
dirge, — the simplest of Poe's melo- 
dies, and the most likely to please 
the common ear. It is said to have 
been his last lyric, and was written, 
I think, with more spontaneity than 
others. The theme is carried along 
skillfully, the movement hastened 
and heightened to the end and there 



EDGAR ALLAN FOE. 



Poe^s higJt- 
est lyrical 
ra7t.ge. 



''The 

Haunted 

Palace:' 



dwelt upon, as often in a piece of 
music. Before considering the poet's 
method of song, I will mention the 
two poems which seem to me to rep- 
resent his highest range, and suffi- 
cient in themselves to preserve the 
memory of a lyrist. 

We overlook the allegory of " The 
Haunted Palace," until it has been 
read more than once ; we think of 
the sound, the phantasmagoric pict- 
ure, the beauty, the lurid close. The 
magic muse of Coleridge, in " Kubla 
Khan," or elsewhere, hardly went 
beyond such lines as these : — 

" Banners yellow, glorious, golden, 

On its roof did float and flow, 
(This — all this — was in the olden 

Time long ago ;) 
And every gentle air that dallied, 

In that sweet day, 
Along the ramparts, plumed and pallid, 

A winged odor went away." 

The conception of a " Lost Mind " 
never has been so imaginatively 
treated, whether by poet or by 
painter. Questioning Poe's own 



EDGAR ALLAN FOE. 53 

mental state, look at this poem and 
see how sane, as an artist, he was 
that made it. " Do you act best 
when you forget yourself in the 
part ? " " No, for then I forget to 
perfect the part." Even more strik- "^sra/ei" 
ing is the song of " Israfel," whose 
heart-strings are a lute. Of all these 
lyrics is not this the most lyrical, — 
not only charged v/ith music, but with 
light? For once, and in his freest 
hour of youth, Poe got above the 
sepulchres and mists, even beyond 
the pale-faced moon, and visited the 
empyrean. There is joy in this carol, 
and the radiance of the skies, and 
ecstatic possession of the gift of 
song: — 

"If I could dwell 
Where Israfel 

Hath dwelt, and he where I, 
He might not sing so wildly well 

A mortal melody, 
While a bolder note than this might swell 

From my lyre within the sky ! " 

All this, with the rapturous harmony 



54 ■ EDGAR ALLAN FOE. 

of the first and third stanzas, is awak- 
ened in the poet's soul by a line from 
the Koran, and the result is even 
finer than the theme. If I had any 
claim to make up a "Parnassus," not 
perhaps of the most famous English 
lyrics, but of those which appeal 
strongly to my own poetic sense, and 
could select but one of Poe's, I con- 
fess that I should choose " Israfel," 
for pure music, for exaltation, and 
for its original, satisfying quality 
of rhythmic art. 



EDGAR ALLAN POE. 55 



IV. 



Few and brief these reliqiiicB which 
determine his fame as a poet. What 
do they tell us of his lyrical genius 
and method? Clearly enough, that ^«^J^^«J^^^ 
he possessed an exquisite f acuity, /^^^-^^y- 
which he exercised within definite 
bounds. It may be that within those 
bounds he would have done more if 
events had not hindered him, as he 
declared, " from making any serious 
effort " in the field of his choice. In 
boyhood he had decided views as to 
the province of song, and he never 
afterward changed them. The pref- 
ace to his West Point edition, ram- 
bling and conceited as it is, — afford- 
ing such a contrast to the proud 
humility of Keats's preface to " En- 
dymion," — gives us the gist of his 



$6 EDGAR ALLAN FOE. 

creed, and shows that the instinct of 
the young poet was scarcely less deli- 
cate than that of his nobler kinsman. 
Poe's theory Pqc thoudit the objcct of Doetrv was 

qfpoetry. ^ J r ^ 

pleasure, not truth ; the pleasure 
must not be definite, but subtile, and 
therefore poetry is opposed to ro- 
mance ; music is an essential^ " since 
the comprehension of sweet sound 
is our most indefinite conception." 
Metaphysics in verse he hated, pro- 
nouncing the Lake theory a new 
form of didacticism that had injured 
even the tuneful Coleridge. For a 
neophyte this was not bad, and after 
certain reservations few will disagree 
with him. Eighteen years later, in 
"^;^^-^rf/'^ his charmins: lecture, "The Poetic 

Principle," * ' 

r843- Principle," he offered simply an ex- 

tension of these ideas, with reasons 
why a long poem " cannot exist." 
One is tempted to rejoin that the 
standard of length in a poem, as in 
a piece of music, is relative, depend- 
ing upon the power of the maker and 



EDGAR ALLAN FOE. 57 

the recipient to prolong their exalted 
moods. We might, also, quote Lan- 
dor's " Pentameron," concerning the 
greatness of a poet, or even Beecher's 
saying that " pint measures are soon 
filled." The lecture justly denounces 
the "heresy of the didactic," and 
then declares poetry to be the child 
of Taste, — devoted solely to the ^'{'^^^ . , 

' •' . Rhythmical 

Rhythmical Creation of Beauty, as it Creation of 
is in music that the soul most nearly 
attains the supernal end for which it 
struggles. In fine, Poe, with " the 
mad pride of intellectuality," refused 
to look beyond the scope of his own 
gift, and would restrict the poet to 
one method and even to a single 
theme. In his ex post facto analysis 
of " The Raven " he conceives the 
highest tone of beauty to be sad- 
ness, caused by the pathos of exist- 
ence and our inability to grasp the 
unknown. Of all beauty that of a 
beautiful woman is the supremest, 
her death is the saddest loss — and 



58 EDGAR ALLAN FOE. 

therefore " the most poetical topic in 
the world." He would treat this mu- 
sically by application of the refrain, 
increasing the sorrowful loveliness 
of his poem by contrast of some- 
thing homely, fantastic, or quaint. 

Poe's own range was quite within 
his theory. His juvenile versions of 
what afterward became poems were 
so very " indefinite " as to express 
almost nothing ; they resembled 
those marvelous stanzas of Dr. Chiv- 
ers, that sound magnificently, — I 
have heard Bayard Taylor and Mr. 
Swinburne rehearse them with shouts 
of delight — and that have no mean- 
ing at all. Poe could not remain a 
Chivers, but sound always was his 
A melodist, fortc. We rarely find his highest 
imagination in his verse, or the crea- 
tion of poetic phrases such as came 
to the lips of Keats without a sum- 
mons. He lacked the dramatic 
power of combination, and produced 
no symphony in rhythm \ was strictly 



EDGAR ALLAN FOE. 59 

a melodist, who achieved wonders in 
a single strain. Neither Mrs. Brown- SJ^-'"'" 
ing nor any other poet had " ap- ^^'^'^• 
plied " the refrain in Poe's fashion, 
nor so effectively. In " The Bells " 
its use is limited almost to one word, 
the only English word, perhaps, that 
could be repeated incessantly as the 
burden of such a poem. In " The 
Raven," "Lenore," and elsewhere, 
he employed the repetend also, and 
with still more novel and poetical re- 
sults : 

"An anthem for the queenliest dead that ever died so 

young, 
A dirge for her, the doubly dead, in that she died so 

young." 

" Our talk had been serious and sober, 
But our thoughts they were palsied and sere, 
Our memories were treacherous and sere.' ' 

One thing profitably may be noted 
by latter-day poets. Poe used none Useofsim- 

1 , T- , . , pie ballad 

but elementary English measures, re->^-»iy. 
lying upon his music and atmos- 
phere for their effect. This is true 
of those which seem most intricate, 
as in " The Bells " and " Ulalume." 



6o EDGAR ALLAN FOE. 

" Lenore " and " For Annie " are 
the simplest of ballad forms. I have 
a fancy that our Southern poet's ear 
caught the music of " Annabel Lee " 
and "Eulalie," if not their special 
quality, from the plaintive, melodi- 
ous negro songs utilized by those 
early writers of " minstrelsy " who 
have been denominated the only 
composers of a genuine American 
school. This suggestion may be 
scouted, but an expert might suspect 
the one to be a patrician refinement 
upon the melody, feeling, and hum- 
ble charm of the other. 

Poe was not a single-poem poet, but 
the poet of a single mood. His ma- 
terials were seemingly a small stock 
in trade, chiefly of Angels and De- 
mons, with an attendance of Dreams, 
Echoes, Ghouls, Gnomes and Mimes, 
sound. ready at hand. He selected or 
coined, for use and re-use, a number 
of what Mr. Miller would call "beau- 
tiful words," — " albatross," "halcy- 
on," " scintillant," " Ligeia," " Weir," 



EDGAR ALLAN POE. 6 1 

" Yaanek," "Auber," '' D'Elormie," 
and the like. Everything was sub- 
ordinate to sound. But his poetry, 
as it places us under the spell of the 
senses, enables us to enter, through 
their reaction upon the spirit, his in- 
definable mood j nor should we for- 
get that Coleridge owes his specific 
rank as a poet, not to his philosophic 
verse, but to melodious fragments, 
and greatly to the rhythm of *' The 
Ancient Mariner " and of " Christa- 
bel." Poe's melodies lure us to the 
point where we seem to hear angelic 
lutes and citherns, or elfin instru- 
ments that make music in " the land 
east of the sun and west of the 
moon." The enchantment may not 
be that of Israfel, nor of the harper 
who exorcised the evil genius of 
Saul* but it is at least that of some 
plumed being of the middle air, of a 
charmer charming so sweetly that 
his numbers are the burden of mys- 
tic dreams. 



62 EDGAR ALLAN POE. 



V. 

If Poe's standing depended chiefly 
Poemost upon tliese few poems, notable as 

einine7it asa ^ ^ ' 

romaficer. they are, his name would be recalled 
less frequently. His intellectual 
strength and rarest imagination are 
to be found in his " Tales." To 
them, and to literary criticism, his 
main labors were devoted. 

The limits of this essay constrain 
me to say less than I have in mind 
concerning his prose writings. As 
with his poems, so with the " Tales," 
— their dates are of little importance. 
His irregular life forced him to alter- 
nate good work with bad, and some 
of his best stories were written early. 
He was an apostle of the art that re- 
fuses to take its color from a given 
time or country, and of the revolt 



EDGAR ALLAN POE. 63 

against commonplace, and his inven- 
tions partook of the romantic and the 
wonderful. He added to a Greek 
perception of form the Oriental pas- 
sion for decoration. All the materi- 
als of the wizard's craft were at his 
command. He was not a pupil of 
Beckford, Godwin, Maturin, Hoff- 
man, or Fouque ; and yet if these 
writers were to be grouped we should 
think also of Poe, and give him no 
second place among them. "The 
young fellow is highly imaginative, 
and a little given to the terrific," said 
Kennedy, in his honest way. Poe 
could not write a novel, as we term 
it, as well as the feeblest of Harper's 
or Roberts's yearlings. He vibrated Realism ^ 

. . afid mysU- 

between two pomts, the realistic and dsm. 
the mystic, and made no attempt to 
combine people or situations in or- 
dinary life, though he knew how to 
lead up to a dramatic tableau or cri- 
sis. His studies of character were 
not made from observation, but from 



64 EDGAR ALLAN FOE. 

acquaintance with himself ; and this 
subjectivity, or egoism, crippled his 
invention and made his "Tales " lit- 
tle better than prose poems. He 
could imagine a series of adventures 

— the experience of a single narrator 

— like " Arthur Gordon Pym," and 
might have been, not Le Sage nor De 
Foe, but an eminent raconteur in his 
own field. His strength is unques- 
tionable in those clever pieces of rati- 
ocination, " The Murders in the Rue 
Morgue," '' The Mystery of Marie 
Roget," "The Purloined Letter;" 
in some of a more fantastic type, 
"The Gold Bug" and "Hans 

Psychologic Pfaall ; " and especiall}'- in those 
with elements of terror and morbid 
psychology added, such as " The 
Descent into the Maelstrom," "The 
Black Cat," " The Tell-tale Heart," 
and the mesmeric sketches. When 
composing these he delighted in the 
exercise of his dexterous intellect, 
like a workman testing his skill. No 



analysis. 



EDGAR ALLAN FOE. 65 

poet is of a low grade who possesses, 
besides an ear for rhythm, the re- 
sources of a brain so fine and active. 
Technical gifts being equal, the more 
intellectual of two poets is the great- 
er. " Best bard, because the wis- 
est." 

His artistic contempt for meta- Contempt 

'- for inetO' 

physics is seen even in those tales physics. 
which appear most transcendental. 
They are charged with a feeling that 
in the realms of psychology we are 
dealing with something ethereal, 
which is none the less substance if 
we might but capture it. They are 
his resolute attempts to find a clew 
to the invisible world. Were he liv- 
ing now, how much he would make 
of our discoveries in light and sound, 
of the correlation of forces ! He 
strove by a kind of divination to put 
his hand upon the links of mind and 
matter, and reach the hiding-places 
of the soul. It galled him that any- 
thing should lie outside the domain 
5 



Master- 
pieces>. 



66 EDGAR ALLAN FOE. 

of human intelligence. His imperi- 
ous intellect rebelled against the 
bounds that shut us in, and found 
passionate expression in works of 
which "Ligeia," "The Fall of the 
House of Usher," and "William Wil- 
son " are the most perfect types. 
The tales in which lyrics are intro- 
duced are full of complex beauty, 
the choicest products of his genius. 
They are the offspring of yearnings 
that lifted him so far above himself 
as to make us forget his failings and 
think of him only as a creative artist, 
a man of noble gifts. 

In these short, purely ideal efforts 
— finished as an artist finishes a 
portrait, or a poet his poem — - Poe 
had no equal in recent times. That 
he lacked sustained power of inven- 
tion is proved, not by his failure to 
complete an extended work, but by 
his under-estimation of its value. 
Such a man measures everything by 
his personal ability, and finds plausi- 



EDGAR ALLAN POE. 67 

ble grounds for the resulting stand- 
ard. Hawthorne had the growing 
power and the staying power that 
gave us " The Scarlet Letter " and 
" The House of the Seven Gables." 
Poe and Hawthorne were the last of 2w?fr«^ 
the romancers. Each was a master 
in his way, and that of Poe was the 
more obvious and material. He was 
expert in much that concerns the 
structure of works, and the modeling 
touches of the poet left beauty-marks 
upon his prose. Yet in spiritual 
meaning his tales were less poetic 
than those of Hawthorne. He re- 
lied upon his externals, making the 
utmost of their gorgeousness of color, 
their splendor and gloom of light 
and shade. Hawthorne found the 
secret meaning of common things, 
and knew how to capture, from the 
plainest aspects of life, an essence 
of evasive beauty which the senses 
of Poe often were unable to perceive. 
It was Hawthorne who heard the 



68 EDGAR ALLAN FOE. 

melodies too fine for mortal ear. 
Hawthorne was wholly masculine, 
with the great tenderness and gen- 
tleness which belong to virile souls. 
Poe had, with the delicacy, the soph- 
istry and w^eakness of a nature more 
or less effeminate. He opposed to 
Hawthorne the fire, the richness, the 
instability of the tropics, as against 
the abiding strength and passion of 
the North. His own conceptions 
astonished him, and he often pre- 
sents himself " with hair on end, at 
his own wonders." Of these two 
artists and seers, the New England- 
er had the profounder insight ; the 
Southerner's magic was that of the 
necromancer who resorts to spells 
and devices, and, when some appari- 
tion by chance responds to his in- 
cantations, is bewildered by the phan- 
tom himself has raised. 

Poe failed to see that the Puritan- 
ism by which Hawthorne's strength 
was tempered was also the source 



EDGAR ALLAN FOE. 69 

from which it sprang; and in his 
general criticism did not pay full 
tribute to a genius he must have felt. 
In some of his sketches, such as 
*' The Man of the Crowd," he used 
Hawthorne's method, and with in- 
ferior results. His reviews of other 
authors and his occasional literary- 
notes have been so carefully pre- 
served as to show his nature by a 
mental and moral photograph. His 
" Marginalia," scrappy and written ]^Y^'*^'^' 
for effect, are the notes of a thinking 
man of letters. The criticisms raised 
a hubbub in their day, and made 
Poe the bogy of his generation — the 
unruly censor whom weaklings not 
only had cause to fear, but often re- 
garded with a sense of cruel injus- 
tice. I acknowledge their frequent 
dishonesty, vulgarity, prejudice, but 
do not, therefore, hold them to be 
worthless. Even a scourge, a pesti- 
lence, has its uses ; before it the puny 
and frail go down, the fittest survive. 



70 EDGAR ALLAN POE. 

And so it was in Poe's Malayan 
campaign. Better that a time of un 
productiveness should follow such 
a thinning out than tnat false and 
feeble things should continue. I 
" rA^ z/z-^r- suspect that "The Literati" made 

att:'' 184b. ^ . , 

room for a new movement, however 
long delayed, in American author 
ship. They are a prose Dunciad, 
waspish and unfair, but full of clev- 
erness, and not without touches of 
magnanimity. Poe had small re- 
spect for the feeling that it is well 
for a critic to discover beauties, since 
any one can point out faults. Yet 
when, as in the cases of Tennyson, 
Mrs. Browning, Taylor, and others, 
he pronounced favorably upon the 
talents of a claimant, and was unin- 
fluenced by personal motives, his 
judgments not seldom have been jus- 
tified by the after-career. Besides, 
what a cartoon he drew of the writers 
of his time, — the corrective of Gris- 
wold's optimistic delineations ! In 



EDGAR ALLAN FOE. 7 1 

the description of a man's personal 
appearance he had the art of placing 
the subject before us with a single 
touch. His tender mercies were 
cruel j he never forgot to prod the 
one sore spot of the author he most 
approved, — was especially intoler- 
ant of his own faults in others, and 
naturally detected these at once. 
When meting out punishment to a 
pretentious writer, he reveled in his 
task, and often made short work, as 
if the pleasure was too great to be 
endurable. The keenness of his satire. 
satire, just or unjust, is mitigated by 
its obvious ferocity : one instinctively 
takes part with the victim. . Nothing 
in journalistic criticism, even at that 
time, was more scathing and ludi- 
crous than his conceit of a popular 
bookwright in the act of confabu- 
lation with the Universe. But he 
marred the work by coarseness, tell- 
ing one man that he was by no 
means a fool, although he did write 



criticism. 



72 EDGAR ALLAN FOE. 

" De Vere," and heading a paper on 
the gentlest and most forbearing of 

poets — " Mr. and other Pla- 

Broad-axe priarists." In short, he constantly 
dulled the edge and temper of his 
rapier, and resorted to the broad-axe, 
using the latter even in his depreca- 
tion of its use by Kit North. Per- 
haps it was needed in those salad 
days by offenders who could be put 
down in no other wise ; but I hold it 
a sign of progress that criticism by 
force of arms would now be less ef- 
fective. 



EDGAR ALLAN FOE. 73 



VI. 

Some analysis of Poe's general ^^^'f ^^'>^ 

•^ ^ fnent ana 

equipment will not be out of place, genius. 
Only in the most perfect tales can 
his English style be called excellent, 
however significant his thought. 
His mannerisms — constant employ- 
ment of the dash for suggestiveness, 
and a habit of italicizing to make a 
point or strengthen an illusion — 
are wearisome, and betray a lack of 
confidence in his skill to use plain 
methods. While asserting the power 
of words to convey absolutely any 
idea of the human mind, he relied 
on sound, quaintness, surprise, and 
other artificial aids. His prose is 
inferior to Hawthorne's ; but some- 
times he excels Hawthorne in quali- 
ties of form and proportion which 



74 EDGAR ALLAN FOE. 

are specially at the service of au- 
thors who are also poets. The 
abrupt beginnings of his stories oft- 
en are artistic : — 

" We had now reached the summit of the 
loftiest crag. For some minutes the old man 
seemed too much exhausted to speak." 
("Descent into the Maelstrom.") 

" The thousand injuries of Fortunate I had 
borne as best I could ; but when he ventured 
upon insult, I vowed revenge." (" The 
Cask of Amontillado.") 

His endings were equally good, when 
he had a clear knowledge of his own 
purpose, and some of his conceptions 
terminate at a dramatic crisis. The 
tone, also, of his masterpieces is 
''The Fall wcll sustaiucd througliout. In "The 
^ £/^Aer.»^^ Fall of the House of Usher," the 
approach to the fated spot, the air, 
the landscape, the tarn, the mansion 
itself, are a perfect study, equal 
to the ride of Childe Roland ; — and 
here Poe excels Browning : we not 
only come with him to the dark 



EDGAR ALLAN FOE. 75 

tower, but we enter and partake its 
mystery, and alone know the secret 
of its accursed fate. The poet's 
analytic faculty has been compared Balzac. 
to that of Balzac, but a parallel goes 
no farther than the material side. 
In condensation he surpassed either 
Balzac or Hawthorne. 

His imagination was not of the Poe\s imagi- 
highest order, for he never dared "^ ^'"** 
to trust to it implicitly ; certainly 
not in his poetry, since he could do 
nothing with a measure like blank 
verse, which is barren in the hands of 
a mere songster, but the glory of Eng- 
lish metrical forms when employed 
by one commanding the strength 
of diction, the beauty and grandeur 
of thought, and all the resources of 
a strongly imaginative poet. Nei- 
ther in verse nor in prose did he cut 
loose from his minor devices, and 
for results of sublimity and awe he 
always depends upon that which is 
grotesque or out of nature. Beauty 



76 EDGAR ALLAN FOE. 

Tiie fantas- of the fantastic or grotesque is not 
the highest beauty. Art, like nat- 
ure, must be fantastic, not in her 
frequent, but in her exceptional 
moods. The rarest ideal dwells in 
a realm beyond that which fascinates 
us by its strangeness or terror, and 
the votaries of the latter have mas- 
ters above them as high as Raphael 
is above Dore. 

In genuine humor Poe seemed 

kimJ^"*''' utterly wanting. He also had Ht- 
tle of the mother-wit that comes in 
flashes and at once ; but his powers 
of irony and satire were so great as 
to make his frequent lapses into in- 
vective the more humiliating. The 
command of humor has distinguished 
men whose genius was both high 
and broad. If inessential to exalt- 
ed poetic work, its absence is hurt- 
ful to the critical and polemic es- 
say. Poe knew this as well as any 
one, but a measureless self-esteem 
would not acknowledge the flaw in 



EDGAR ALLAN FOE. 77 

his armor. Hence, efforts which 
involved the delusion that humor 
may come by works and not by in- 
born gift. Humor is congenital and ^j^''^^^^/ 
rare, the fruit of natural mellowness, immorists. 
of sensitiveness to the light and hu- 
mane phases of life. It is, more- 
over, set in action by an unselfish 
heart. Such is the mirth of Thack- 
eray, of Cervantes and Moliere, and 
of the one master of English song. 
Poe's consciousness of his defect, and 
his refusal to believe it incurable, are 
manifest in trashy sketches for which 
he had a market, and which are hu- 
morous only to one who sees the 
ludicrous side of their failure. He 
analyzed mirth as the product of 
incongruity, and went to work upon 
a theory to produce it. The result 
is seen not only in the extravaganzas 
to which I refer, — and it is a pity 
that these should have been hunted 
up so laboriously, — but in the use 
of what he thought was humor to 



78 EDGAR ALLAN FOE. 

barb his criticisms, and as a con- 
trast to the exciting passages of his 
analytical tales. One of his sketch- 
es, " The Due de I'Omelette," after 
the lighter French manner, is full of 
grace and jaunty persiflage, but most 
of his whimsical " pot-boilers " are 
deplorably absurd. There is some- 
thing akin to humor in the sub-hand- 
ling of his favorite themes, — such 
as the awe and mystery of death, the 
terrors of pestilence, insanity, or re- 
Thegro- morsc. The srrotesque and nether 

Usque. • T r T . 1/. 

Side of these matters presents itself 
to him, and then his irony, with its 
repulsive fancies, is as near humor 
as he ever approaches. That is to 
say, it is grave-yard humor, the kind 
which sends a chill down our backs, 
and implies a contempt for our bod- 
ies and souls, for the perils, helpless- 
ness, and meanness of the stricken 
human race. 
Character ^^^ ^^ somctimes Called a man of 
"(chdarshii. extraordinary learning. Upon a first 



EDGAR ALLAN FOE. 79 

acquaintance, one might receive the 
impression that his scholarship was 
not only varied, but thorough. A 
study of his works has satisfied me 
that he possessed literary resources 
and knew how to make the most of 
them. In this he resembled Bulwer, 
and, with far less abundant mate- 
rials than the latter required, em- 
ployed them as speciously. He 
easily threw a glamour of erudition Affectation 
about his work, by the use of phrases 
from old authors he had read, or 
among whose treatises he had for- 
aged with special design. It was 
his knack to cull sentences which, 
taken by themselves, produce a weird 
or impressive effect, and to reframe 
them skillfully. This plan was clever, 
and resulted in something that could 
best be muttered " darkly, at dead 
of night ; " but it partook of trickery, 
even in its art. He had little exact 
scholarship, nor needed it, dealing, 
as he did, not with the processes of 



8o EDGAR ALLAN FOE. 

learning, but with results that could 
subserve the play of his imagination. 
Shakespeare's anachronisms and illu- 
sions were made as he required them, 
and with a fine disdain. Poe resort- 
ed to them of malice aforethought, 
and under pretense of correctness. 
Still, the work of a romancer and 
poet is not that of a book-worm. 
A ^ood What he needs is a s:ood reference* 

rejerence- ® 

knowledge, knowledge, and this Poe had. His 
irregular school-boy training was not 
likely to give him the scholastic hab- 
it, nor would his impatient manhood 
otherwise have confirmed it. I am 
sure that we may consider that por- 
tion of his youth to have been of 
most worth which was devoted, as in 
the case of many a born writer, to 
the unconscious education obtained 
from the reading, for the mere love 
of it, of all books to which he had 
access. This training served him 
well. It enabled him to give his ro- 
mance an alchemic air, by citation 



EDGAR ALLAN FOE. 8 1 

from writers like Chapman, Thomas 
More, Bishop King, etc., and from 
Latin and French authors in profu- 
sion. His French tendencies were 
natural, and he learned enough of the . 
language to read much of its current 
literature and get hold of modes un- 
known to many of his fellow-writers. 
I have said that his stock in trade 
was narrow, but for the adroit dis- 
play of it examine any of his tales 
and sketches, — for example, " Ber- 
enice," or "The Assignation." 

In knowledge of what may be ^/^ ^nate- 
called the properties of his romance, 
he was more honestly grounded. He 
had the good fortune to utilize the 
Southern life and scenery which he 
knew in youth. It chanced, also, 
that during some years of his boy- 
hood — that formative period whose 
impressions are indelible — he lived 
in a characteristic part of England. 
He had seen with his own eyes cas- 
tles, abbeys, the hangings and tapes- 



82 EDGAR ALLAN FOE. 

tries and other by-gone trappings of 
ancient rooms, and remembered ef- 
fects of decoration and color which 
always came to his aid. These he 
used as if he were born to them ; 
never, certainly, with the surprise at 
their richness which vulgarizes Dis- 
raeli's " Lothair." In some way, 
known to genius, he also caught the 
romance of France, of Italy, of the 
Orient, and one tale or another is 
transfused with their atmosphere ; 
while the central figure, however dis- 
guised, is always the image of the 
romancer himself. His equipment, 
on the whole, was not a pedant's, 
much less that of a searcher after 
truth ; it was that of a poet and a 
literary workman. Yet he had the 
hunger which animates the imagina- 
tive student, and, had he been led to 
devote himself to science, would have 
contributed to the sum of knowledge. 
"■Eureka: In Writing "Eureka," he was unques- 
'.-P<>^»»," 75-i«5. tionably sincere, and forgot himself 



EDGAR ALLAN FOE. 83 

more nearly than in any other act of 
his professional life. But here his 
inexact learning betrayed him. What 
was begun in conviction — a swift 
generalization from scientific theo- 
ries of the, universe — grew to be so 
far beyond the data at his command, 
or so inconsistent with them, that he 
finally saw he had written little else 
than a prose poem, and desired that 
it should be so regarded. Of all 
sciences, astronomy appeals most to 
the imagination. What is rational in 
" Eureka " mostly is a re-statement 
of accepted theories : otherwise the 
treatise is vague and nebulous, — a 
light dimmed by its own vapor. The 
work is curiously saturated with our 
modern Pantheism ; and although in 
many portions it shows the author's 
weariness, yet it was a notable pro- 
duction for a layman venturing within ^ layman's 

. r 1 mi imaginative 

the precincts of the savant. The venture. 
poetic instinct hits upon truths which 
the science of the future confirms ; 



84 EDGAR ALLAN POE. 

but as often, perhaps, it glorifies 
some error sprung from a too ar- 
dent generalization. Poe's inexact- 
ness was shown in frequent slips, — 
sometimes made unconsciously, some- 
times in reliance upon the dullness 
of his rivals to save him from detec- 
tion. He was on the alert for other 
people's errors ; for his own facts, 
were he now alive, he could not 
call so lightly upon his imagination. 
Even our younger authors, here and 
abroad, now are so well equipped 
that their learning seems to handicap 
their winged steeds. Poe had, above 
p^oetic in.- all, the gift of poetic induction. He 
would have divined the nature of an 
unknown world from a specimen of 
its flora, a fragment of its art. He 
felt himself something more than a 
bookman. He was a creator of the 
beautiful, and hence the conscious 
struggle of his spirit for the suste- 
nance it craved. Even when he was 
most in error, he labored as an art- 



dtiction. 



EDGAR ALLAN FOE. 85 

ist, and it is idle criticism that 
judges him upon any other ground. 
Accept him, then, whether as poet 
or romancer, as a pioneer of the art 
feeling in American literature. So 
far as he was devoted to art for art's Poe's abso- 
sake, it was for her sake as the ex- Imutyf 
ponent of beauty. No man ever 
lived in whom the passion for loveli- 
ness so governed the emotions and 
convictions. His service of the beau- 
tiful was idolatry, and he would have 
kneeled with Heine at the feet of 
Our Lady of Milo, and believed that 
she yearned to help him. This con- 
secration to absolute beauty made 
him abhor the mixture of sentiment- 
alism, metaphysics, and morals, in 
its presentation. It was a foregone 
conclusion that neither Longfellow, 
Emerson, Lowell, nor Hawthorne 
should wholly satisfy him. The ques- 
tion of " moral " tendency concerned 
him not in the least. He did not 
feel with Keats that "Beauty is truth, 



86 EDGAR ALLAN POE. 

truth beauty," and that a divine per- 
fection may be reached by either 
road. This deficiency narrowed his 
range both as a poet and as a critic. 
His sense of justice was a sense of 
the fitness of things, and — strange 
to say — when he put it aside he for- 
got that he was doing an unseemly 
a^afmtdl ^^^"S* Otherwise, he represents, or 
dacticism. was ouc of the first to lead, a rebel- 
lion against formalism, commonplace, 
the spirit of the bourgeois. In this 
movement Whitman is his counter- 
type at the pole opposite from that 
of art ; and hence they justly are 
picked out from the rest of us and 
associated in foreign minds. Taste 
was Poe's supreme faculty. Beauty, 
to him, was a definite and logical 
reality, and he would have scouted 
Taste. Veron's claim that it has no fixed 

objective laws, and exists only in the 
nature of the observer. Although 
the brakes of art were on his imagi- 
nation, his taste was not wholly pure j 



EDGAR ALLAN POE. 87 

he vacillated between the classic 
forms and those allied with color, 
splendor, Oriental decoration ; be- 
tween his love for the antique and 
his impressions of the mystical and 
grotesque. But he was almost with- 
out confraternity. An artist in an isolation. 
unartistic period, he had to grope 
his way, to contend with stupidity 
and coarseness. Again, his imagi- 
nation, gloating upon the possibili- 
ties of taste, violated its simplicity. 
Poe longed for the lamp of Aladdin, 
for the riches of the Gnomes. Had 
unbounded wealth been his, he would 
have outvied Beckford, Landor, Du- 
mas, in barbaric extravagance of 
architecture. His efforts to apply ^^^r'^^^'^^ 
the laws of the beautiful to imaginary 
decoration, architecture, landscape, 
are very fascinating as seen in " The 
Philosophy of Furniture," " Land- 
scape Gardening," and "Lander's 
Cottage." " The Domain of Arn- 
heim " is a marvelous dream of an 



88 EDGAR ALLAN FOE. 

earthly paradise, and the close is a 
piece of word-painting as effective as 
the language contains. Regarding 
this sensitive artist, this original 
A tragedy, poct, it sccms indeed a tragedy that 
a man so ideal in either realm, so 
unfit for contact with ugliness, dull- 
ness, brutality, should have come to 
eat husks with the swine, to be mis- 
used by their human counterparts, 
and to die the death of a drunkard, 
in the refuge which society offers to 
the most forlorn and hopeless of its 
castaways. 



EDGAR ALLAN FOE. 89 



VII. 

Seeking our illustrations of the a smg^dar^ 

... f~ -i c and pntheiic 

poetic life, we find no career of more career. 
touching and curious interest than 
that of Poe. It is said that disaster 
followed him even after death, in the 
vicious memoir which Griswold pre- 
fixed to his collected works ; and 
doubtless the poet should have had 
for his biographer a man of kind and 
healthy discernment, like Kennedy, 
his townsman and generous friend. 
Yet Poe showed tact in choosing 
Griswold, and builded better than he 
knew. He could select no more in- 
defatigable bookwright to bring to- 
gether his scattered writings, and he 
counted upon Death's paying all 
debts. In this Poe was mistaken. GrhwoWs 
For once Griswold wrote as he 



9° EDGAR ALLAN FOE. 

thought and felt, and his memoir, 
however spiteful and unchivalrous, 
was more sincere than many of the 
sycophantic sketches in the bulky 
volumes of his " Poets and Poetry." 
Malice made him eloquent, and an 
off-hand obituary notice of the poet 
was the most nervous piece of work 
that ever came from his pen. It was 
heartless, and, in some respects, in- 
accurate. It brought so much wrath 
upon him that he became vindictive, 
and followed it up with a memoir, 
which, as an exhibition of the igno- 
ble nature of its author, scarcely has 
a parallel. Did this in the end affect 
Effect upon Poc's fame injuriously? Far other- 

Poe'^sfame. . . , , . . , 

Wise ; it moved a host of writers, be- 
ginning with Willis and Graham, to 
recall his habit of life, and reveal the 
good side of it. Some have gone as 
far in eulogy as Griswold went toward 
the opposite extreme. It seemed a 
cruel irony of fate that Poe's own 
biographer should plant thorns upon 



EDGAR ALLAN POE. 9 1 

his grave, but he also planted laurels. 
He paid an unstinted tribute to the 
poet's genius, and this was the only 
concession which Poe himself would 
care to demand. With sterner irony, 
Time brings in his revenges ! In 
the present edition of the poet's 
works, for which Griswold laid the 
ground-work, the memoir by Ingram 
is devoted largely to correcting the 
errors of the Doctor's long-since ex- 
cluded sketch, and to exposing every 
act of malice against Poe which 
Griswold committed, either before 
or after his foeman's death. 

After years of censure and defense, Foe's habits 
and in the light of his own writings, Zmerl.^' 
the poet's character is not " beyond 
all conjecture." Here was a man 
of letters who fulfilled the traditions 
of a past century in this western 
world and modern time ; one over- 
possessed and hampered by the very 
temperament that made him a poet 
— and this, too, when he thought 



92 EDGAR ALLAN FOE. 

himself deliberate and calculating. 
His head was superbly developed, 
his brain-power too great for its re- 
sources of supply and control. The 
testimony of some who knew his 
home-life is that he was tender and 
lovable. Graham and Willis aver 
that he was patient and regular in 
work, and scrupulous to return a just 
amount of labor for value received. 
But many who knew and befriended 
him have spoken, more in sorrow 
than in anger, of his treachery and 
thanklessness, of his injustice to him- 
self, and of the degrading excesses 
which plunged him into depths from 
which it grew more and more difficult 
to lift him. 

Nevertheless, Poe was not a man 
Love of the of immoral habits. I assert that 

ideal are- , , . . . 

straintupojt profcssional men and artists, ni spite 

seyisuaiy. ^^ ^ vulgar belief to the contrary, 

are purity itself compared with men 

engaged in business and idle men of 

the world. Study and a love of the 



EDGAR ALLAN FOE. 93 

ideal protect them against the sensu- 
ality by which too many dull the zest 
of their appetites. Poe was no ex- 
ception to the rule. He was not a 
libertine. Woman was to him the 
impersonation of celestial beauty, 
her influence soothed and elevated 
him, and in her presence he was 
s^entle, winning-, and subdued. There chastity of 

Y ° . . -Poe^s wrti- 

is not an unchaste suggestion in the "^.^-y- 
whole course of his writings, — a re- 
markable fact, in view of his ac- 
quaintances with the various schools 
of French literature. His works are 
almost too spiritual. Not of the 
earth, earthy, their personages meet 
with the rapture and co-absorption 
of disembodied souls. His verse 
and prose express devotion to Beauty 
in her most ethereal guise, and he 
justly might cry out with Shelley : 

" I vowed that I would dedicate my powers 
To thee and thine ; have I not kept the vow ? " 

Nor was he undevotional. His sense 'JfJ^^Zn 
of the sublime and mystical filled '"^runklrd. 



94 EDGAR ALLAN FOE. 

him with thoughts of other worlds 
and existences than ours ; if there is 
pride, there is reverence, in his bold 
imaginings. He felt a spark of the 
divine fire within him, and the pride 
of his intellectual disdain was, like 
the Titan's, a not inglorious sin. 
Finally, Poe was pot an habitual 
drunkard. He had woful fits of 
drunkenness, varying in frequency, 
and sometimes of degradation ; for 
a single glass made him the easy 
prey of any coarse and pitiless hands 
^^ into which he might fall. He was a 

Y man inebriate when sober, his brain 

surging with emotion, and a stimu- 
lant that only served to steady com- 
mon men bewildered him. As with 
women, the least contamination was 
Hishered- to him debasement. His mature 
years were a battle with inherited 
taint, and there were long periods in 
which he was the victor. This taint 
had been increased by drugging in 
infancy, and by the convivial usages 



EDGAR ALLAN POE. 95 

of his guardian's household. Bear- 
ing in mind, also, the lack of self- 
control inherent in Celtic and South- 
ern natures, I think he made a plucky- 
fight. The duty of self-support was 
not one to which he had been trained, 
and was more than he could bear. 
Imagine Shelley, who made his paper 
boats of bank-notes, Byron and Lan- 
der, who had their old estates, forced 
to write by the column for their 
weekly board. " Poverty has this Effects of 
disease : through want it teaches ^L^sleu^^v^^- 
man evil." More, it limits the range ^'J}^-.^ ^^ge 
of his possibilities. Doudan has ^^• 
said, with truth and feeling, that he 
who is without security for the mor- 
row can neither meditate upon nor 
accomplish a lasting work. The del- 
icate fancies of certain writers are 
not always at quick command, and 
the public is loth to wait and pay for 
quality. Poe, more than once, fell 
into disgrace by not being able to 
meet his literary engagements on 



96 EDGAR ALLAN FOE. 

time. His most absurd and outra- 
geous articles, such as the one put 
forth after his Boston lecture, were 
the bluster of a man who strove to 
hide a sense of humiliation and fail- 
ure. Doubtless, he secretly invoked 
the gods in his own behalf. He 
knew, like Chenier going to his death, 
that it was a pity — he was worth 
saving. Generous efforts, in truth, 
were made to save him, by strong 
and tender friends, but these were 
quite in vain. He carried a death- 
^ warrant within him. Well might he 
feel that a spell was on him, and in 
one tale and another try to make the 
world — which he affected to despise 
— comprehend its fatality, and be- 
speak the sympathetic verdict of the 
future upon his defeat and doom. 
It is just that well-balanced per- 
Hissensitive SOUS sliouM rcbukc the failinsfs of 

tempera- ° 

me7tt. genius. But let such an one imagine 

himself with a painfully sensitive or- 
ganization, — *' all touch, all eye, all 



EDGAR ALLAN POE. 97 

ear j " with appetites almost resist- 
less ; with a frame in which health 
and success breed a dangerous rapt- 
ure, disease and sorrow a fatal de- 
spair. Surmount all this with a pow- 
erful intelligence that does not so 
much rule the structure as it menaces 
it, and threatens to shake it asunder. 
Let him conceive himself as adrift, 
from the first, among adverse sur- 
roundings, now combating his envi- 
ronment, now struggling to adjust 
himself to it. He, too, might find 
his judgment a broken reed ; his pas- 
sions might get the upper hand ; his 
perplexities bring him to shameless- 
ness and ruin. It was thus the poet's 
curse came upon him, and the wings 
of his Psyche were sorrowfully trailed 

in the dust. I have said to friends 'P^e price- 
less rarity 
as they sneered at the ill-managed 0/ genius. 

life of one whose special genius per- 
haps could not exist but in union 
with certain infirmities, that instead 
of recounting these, and deriding 



98 EDGAR ALLAN FOE. 

them, they should hedge him round 
with their protection. We can find 
more than one man of sense among 
a thousand, but how rarely a poet 
with such a gift ! When he has gone 
his music will linger, and be precious 
to those who never have heard, like 
ourselves, the sweet bells jangled. 
Making every allowance, Poe was 
Lack of self- terribly blamable. We all are mis- 

poise. 

understood, and all condemned to 
toil. The sprites have their task- 
work, and cannot always be dancing 
in the moonlight. At times, we are 
told, they have to consort with what 
is ugly, and even take on its guise. 
Unhappily, Poe was the reverse of 
one who "fortune's buffets and re- 
wards has ta'en with equal thanks." 
He stood good fortune more poorly 
than bad ; any emotion would upset 
him, and his worst falls were after 
successes, or with success just in 
sight. His devotion to beauty was 
eagerly selfish. He had a heart, and 



EDGAR ALLAN POE. 99 

in youth was loyal to those he loved. 
In this respect he differed from the 
hero of "A Strange Story," born 
without affection or soul. But his 
dream was that of " The Palace 
of Art" — a lordly pleasure-house, 
where taste and love should have 
their fill, regardless of the outer 
world. It has been well said, that ^'^^ "f", , 

' tnoral, but 

if not immoral, he was unmoral, unmoral. 
With him an end justified the means, 
and he had no conception of the law 
and limitations of liberty, no practi- 
cal sense of right or wrong. At the 
most, he ignored such matters as 
things irrelevant. Now it is not es- 
sential that one should have a creed ; 
he may relegate theologies to the 
regions of the unknowable; but he 
must be just in order to fear not, 
and humane that he may be loved ; 
he must be faithful to some moral 
standard of his own, otherwise his 
house, however beautiful and lordly, 
is founded in the sand. 



lOO EDGAR ALLAN POE. 

^^^Ti'Tof^ The question always will recur, 
neurotic dis- yj^'\\^\}^Q,x, if Poc had been able to 
govern his life aright, he would not 
also have been conventional and 
tame, and so much the less a poet. 
Were it not for his excesses and neu- 
rotic crises, should we have had the 
peculiar quality of his art and the 
works it has left us ? I cannot here 
discuss the theory that his genius was 
a frenzy, and that poetry is the prod- 
uct of abnormal nerve-vibrations. 
The claim, after all, is a scientific 
statement of the belief that great 
wits are sure to madness near allied. 
An examination of it involves the 
whole ground of fate, free will, and 
moral responsibility. I think that 
Poe was bounden for his acts. He 
never failed to resent infringements 
upon his own manor ; and, however 
poor his self-control, it was not often 
with him that the chord of self passed 
trembling out of sight. Possibly his 
most exquisite, as they were his most 



EDGAR ALLAN FOE. 1 01 

poetic, moments, were at those times 
when he seemed the wretchedest, 
and avowed himself oppressed by a 
sense of doom. He loved his share 
of pain, and was an instance of the 
fact that man is the one being that 
takes keen delight in the tragedy 
of its own existence, and for whom 

"Joy is deepest when it springs from woe." 

Wandering among the graves of those 
he had cherished, invoking the spec- 
tral midnight skies, believing himself 
the Orestes of his race — in all this 
he was fulfilling his nature, deriving 
the supremest sensations, feeding on 
the plants of night from which such 
as he obtain their sustenance or go 
famished. They who do not per- 
ceive this never will comprehend 
the mysteries of art and song, of the 
heart from whose recesses these must 
be evoked. They err who commiser- 
ate Poe for such experiences. My 
own pity for him is of another kind ; jf^^f/^^ 
it is that which we ever must feel for ters. 



102 EDGAR ALLAN FOE. 

one in whom the rarest possibilities 
were blighted by an inherent lack of 
will. In his sensitiveness to impres- 
sions like the foregoing, he had at 
once the mood and material for far 
greater results than he achieved. A 
violin cracks none the sooner for 
being played in a minor key. His 
instrument broke for want of a firm 
and even hand to use it ^ a virile, 
devoted master to prolong the strain. 
Poe's demand for his present wish 
was always strong, yet it was the ca- 
price of a child, and not the deter- 
mination that stays and conquers. 
He was no more of an egoist than 
was Goethe ; but self-absorption is 
the edged tool that maims a waver- 
1^0 real y^^ hand. His will, in the primary 

strength of ^ ^ r '^ ^_ • - 

will. sense, was weak from the begmnmg. 

It became more and more reduced 
by those habits which, of all the de- 
fences of a noble mind, attack this 
stronghold first. It was not able to 
preserve for him the sanity of true 



EDGAR ALLAN FOE. 103 

genius, and his product, therefore, 
was so much the less complete. 

' ' O well for him whose will is strong"! 
He suffers, but he will not suffer long." 

Poe suffered, in bitter truth, and the 
end came not through triumph, but 
in death. His fame is not what it 
might have been, we say ; yet it is 
greater than he probably thought — 
dying with a sense of incomplete- 
ness it would be, and more than he 
could have asked. In spite, then, ^'^^^ "^9^^^ 

■^ ' 'on worth 

of the most reckless career, the work ««^ -^ork. 
a man really accomplishes — both for 
what it is in itself and for what it re- 
veals of the author's gift — in the end 
will be valued exactly at its worth. 
Does the poet, the artist, demand 
some promise that it also may be 
made to tell during our working life, 
and even that life be lengthened 
till the world shall learn to honor it ? 
Let him recall the grave, exalted 
words which Poe took at hazard for 
his " Ligeia," and stayed not to dwell 



104 EDGAR ALLAN FOE, 

upon their spiritual meaning : " Man 
doth not yield himself to the angels, 
nor unto death utterly, save only 
through the weakness of his own 
feeble will." 



E. C. STEDMAN 



Edgar Allan Poe 




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